Internet Telepathy? Thoughts Transmitted Online

When physicians run out of treatment options they look to a nascent field known as bioengineering. Specialized scientists apply engineering principles to biological systems, opening up the possibility of creating new human tissue, organs, blood and even corneas such as the one shown here. Waiting lists for organ transplants continue to be lengthy so the race to save lives with bioengineered body parts is on. Here’s a look at some of the most notable achievements in recent years.

Cambridge University Department of Engineering

View Caption+#2: Skin

Producing small amounts of artificial skin to graft on patients and use for toxicity testing has been possible for years. Human skin cells are cultivated in the lab and then embedded in a collagen scaffold. In 2011, the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology introduced a system that can rapidly manufacture two-layer artificial skin models. Their Tissue Factory has the capacity to make 5,000 skin sheets in a month.

Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology

View Caption+#3: Ear

Reproducing 3-D biological structures, particularly the complex human ear, presents significant challenges for bioengineers. A team at Princeton University led by mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Michael McAlpine used 3-D printing technology to make a functional ear from calf cells and electronic materials. The ear that debuted in May 2013 is no mere replacement -- it can pick up radio frequencies well beyond the range that human ears normally detect.

Princeton University / Frank Wojciechowski

View Caption+#4: Bladder

Surgeon Anthony Atala directs the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine and is known for growing new human cells, tissues and organs -- particularly ones that advance urology. Atala and his team’s bioengineered bladders succeeded in clinical trials. The bladders were constructed from patients’ cells that were grown over two months on a biodegradable scaffold and then implanted. Patients included children with spina bifida who risked kidney failure. It’s been several years since then and the results are positive. “These constructs appear to be doing well as patients get older and grow,” Atala told the NIH Record.

Popular Science via Getty Images

View Caption+#5: Blood Vessels

Being able to make blood vessels in the lab from a patient’s own cells could mean better treatments for cardiovascular disease, kidney disease and diabetes. In 2011, the head of California-based Cytograft Tissue Engineering reported progress in a study where three end-stage kidney disease patients were implanted with blood vessels bioengineered in the lab. After eight months the grafts continued to work well, easing access to dialysis. Then this month a team at Massachusetts General Hospital found a way to encourage stem-like cells to develop into vascular precursor cells, a key step on the way to becoming blood vessel cells. They generated long-lasting blood vessels in living mice.

Massachusetts General Hospital/PNAS

View Caption+#6: Heart

Artificial heart devices have been surgically implanted since the 1980s, but no device has been able to replace the human heart as effectively as a healthy biological one. After all, a human heart pumps 35 million times in a single year. Recently scientists have made advances in adding more biological material to artificial heart devices. In May the French company Carmat prepared to test an artificial device containing cow heart tissue. At Massachusetts General Hospital, surgeon Harald C. Ott and his team are working on a bioartificial heart scaffold while MIT researchers recently printed functional heart tissue from rodent cells.

Ott Lab / Massachusetts General Hospital

View Caption+#7: Liver

Bioengineers are working on it, but the liver is one of the largest, most challenging organs to recreate. In 2010 bioengineers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center grew miniature livers in the lab using decellularized animal livers for the structure and human cells. This month, a team from the Yokohama City University Graduate School of Medicine published results of a study where they reprogrammed human adult skin cells, added other cell types, and got them to grow into early-stage liver “buds.” Currently the scientists can produce about 100 of them, but the study’s lead author Takanori Takebe told the Wall Street Journal that even a partial liver would require tens of thousands.

Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center

View Caption+#8: Trachea

In April, after an international team of surgeons spent nine hours operating on her at Children's Hospital of Illinois in Peoria, 32-month old Hannah Warren became the youngest patient to ever receive a bioengineered organ. Scientists had made a windpipe for her using her own bone marrow cells. Born without a trachea, she needed help breathing, eating, drinking and talking. Harvard Bioscience created the custom scaffold and bioreactor for the experimental procedure. Sadly Hannah died on July 7 due to complications from a more recent surgery on her esophagus. Despite the high risks, bioengineers say they will continue to move ahead.

Harvard Apparatus Regenerative Technology

View Caption+#9: Back Discs

When a ruptured or degenerating disc causes chronic back pain, treatment is limited. At worst, patients undergo surgery to fuse vertebrae together and then have limited flexibility. Over the past several years artificial discs have emerged as an alternative, but they can wear out as they work. In 2011, a research team from Cornell University bioengineered implants using gel and collagen seeded with rat cells that were then successfully placed into rat spines. This summer Duke bioengineers took things further, coming up with a gel mixture they think can help regenerate tissue when injected into the space between discs.

Robby Bowles

View Caption+#10: Intestines

Little by little, bioengineered intestines are being grown in the lab to diagnose digestive disorders and to help patients born without a piece of intestine. In 2011, Cornell biological and environmental engineering assistant professor John March began collaborating with Pittsburgh-based pediatric surgeon David Hackam on a small artificial intestine using collagen and stem cells. Then last year in Switzerland, EPFL professor Martin Gijs led a project in the Laboratory of Microsystems to create a miniature intestinal wall from cultured epithelial cells and electronics called NutriChip to identify foods that cause inflammation. Scientists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute also made a “gut-on-a chip” to mimic the real thing using intestinal cells in a tiny silicon polymer device.

EPFL

View Caption+#11: Kidney

One in 10 American adults will have some level of chronic kidney disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Currently around 600,000 patients in the U.S. have chronic kidney failure. Most rely on dialysis while a fraction of them actually get transplants. Scientists from the University of California, San Francisco are on a mission to create a sophisticated artificial kidney device made with human kidney cells, silicon nanofilters and powered by blood pressure. The project, led by UCSF nephrologist William Fissell and bioengineering professor Shuvo Roy, aims to begin testing the kidney device in 2017.

University of California, San Francisco

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Yet another dispatch from our Didn’t See That One Coming bureau: According to a newly published study, an international team of neuroscientists and robotics engineers have managed a kind of Internet telepathy, sending the thoughts of one person directly to another person online.

Researchers from several different countries worked together on the project, in which a single-word thought was transmitted from one person to three others by way of Internet-linked electroencephalogram (EEG) devices. The sender, located in India, successfully transmitted the words “hola” and “ciao” to receivers in a laboratory in France. A second similar experiment transmitted between Spain and France.

So is this the first instance of technologically-driven Internet telepathy? Kinda-sorta. As usual, the devil is in the details, and it depends on how you define your terms.

It works like this: On the sender’s end, the system uses existing brain-computer interactions (BCI) technology, in which electrodes attached to the scalp monitor specific electric currents in the brain. Those signals trigger particular outputs — such as with prosthetic systems that allow people to move artificial limbs by just thinking about it. In this case, the sender’s “word thoughts” are translated into binary code.

PLOS ONE

On the receivers’ end, the process is essentially reversed by way of a computer-brain (CBI) interface. The binary code thoughts — “hola” and “ciao” — are delivered to the brain through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) technology, again through the scalp. The receivers experience the messages as phosphenes, or flashes of light in their peripheral vision.

Here’s where the telepathy metaphor goes a bit sideways. Receivers don’t “hear” the words as internal thoughts. Rather, they decode numerical sequences in the flashing phosphenes, sort of like a mental Morse Code. Also, the binary information was not transmitted via some space-age global telecommunications matrix. It was sent by, um, email.

Still, the research team makes its case in the project’s press materials: “By using advanced precision neuro-technologies including wireless EEG and robotized TMS, we were able to directly and noninvasively transmit a thought from one person to another, without them having to speak or write,” writes study coauthor Alvaro Pascual-Leone of Harvard Medical School.

Can’t argue with that. The study was published in the online scientific journal PLOS ONE.